George Berkeley and Romanticism
Metadata
- Author: Chris Townsend
Highlights
images and ideas presented by Berkeley’s writings were essential in the construction of Romanticism, in that they provided philosophical grounds for many of the experiences we now tend to think of as ‘Romantic’: of intuited knowledge of spirit and of the self; of felt knowledge of God or the divine; and, centrally, of nature’s role as a system of signs that mediates between self and God. — location: 87
It’s this Berkeley, who is first and foremost concerned with language and with writing, that this book pursues into the works of the Romantics. Berkeley was deeply concerned—anxious, even—about the perceived power of words to mislead, but he was also keen to harness that power, and to master the art of writing convincingly and persuasively. — location: 116
The tenets of Berkeley’s system thus promote a correspondence theory of the world that Berkeley himself would repeatedly liken to language; more than this, he would repeatedly insist that the world itself was language. — location: 97
Berkeley’s broader influence, in this sense, acts as a case study in thinking about the reception of philosophic thought in verse-form poetry: the form of poetry, and the resources of poetic rhythms, place an insistent pressure on ideas, and the result is very often a new kind of thinking altogether. This book is a case study, too, in understanding Romanticism’s relation — location: 126
Romanticism found affinities with Berkeley’s emphasis on spirit and on language, and indeed with the notion of the world as spiritual language. — location: 138
Perceiving spirits give shape to Berkeley’s system, actively making sense of the linguistic structure of the passive universe, and causing all motion and meaning in the world. Spirit is the substance Berkeley turned to to replace matter, as the container of ideas and objects alike, and spirit is the dominant image in his works. When we see the world, we participate in causing its being: its esse is in percipi. Berkeley’s universe is not composed of a tissue of ideas, but of the minds that support those ideas. He was, in a very particular sense, a spiritual thinker. — location: 155
In essence, Berkeley is a thoroughgoing empiricist, but he represents empiricism spiritualized. In that sense, he lays down the foundation for the intense meditations on the senses and the soul that are central to Romantic aesthetics and poetics. — location: 180
Yet it’s precisely in poetry’s openness to a logic of inclusion rather than exclusion—self and world, materialism and idealism, spirit and Enlightenment—that allows it to think apart from philosophy, even as it draws on philosophical sources. — location: 192
To treat poetry as an intellectually as well as emotionally rich discourse, and to think of verse aesthetics as cognitively significant (rather than simply ornamental), is to approach the original contribution made by Romanticism as a movement. — location: 199
Rather, Wordsworth’s verse presents us with his experience of the world and of his own mind—experience that is complicated, changeful, often ambiguous, and ever varying. The accommodating space of poetry allows a poet like Wordsworth to take up multiple philosophical perspectives, and to take those perspectives seriously, sometimes within the same poetic line. — location: 206
Ghostly Language, then, is language imbued with spirit, or language that seems so imbued, with an openness to the potential of those being very different things: the world, for Berkeley, was exhausted in its appearance, but for the Romantic poets who read Berkeley, appearances always sit in dubious relation to reality. ‘Ghostly Language’ is also natural language, as spoken, apparently, by a divine spirit; it is language that is capable of speaking of spirit, and about spirit, as well as to spirits; and it is human language that wants to transcend its own parameters, to come into contact with divinity, raise human consciousness to divine heights, or at any rate overcome the gulf that separates human subjects from one another or from the world in which they find themselves. It is the stuff of poetry. — location: 209
Berkeley’s thinking developed in step with the mode by which he expressed that thought. — location: 227
The movement from particular things to universal ideas in Berkeley—essentially a feat of the imagination—resonates in Blake’s movement from individual lifeforms to the collective spiritual entity he called the ‘Human Form Divine’. — location: 240
He agreed with Berkeley that objects could only be experienced as ideas, and drew heavily on Berkeley’s work to make that argument, yet he believed that the imagination also gave us the power to picture in our minds the world as it exists outside of the mind and without us—above and beyond anywhere Berkeley was prepared to go in his philosophy. Berkeley, in short, provides Shelley with the means of reconstructing Kant’s noumenal world without his having recourse to Kant. — location: 280
Romanticism’s enlightenment is ‘radical’ because, like Berkeley, it adheres so strongly to the methods of empiricism and yet reaches far beyond the boundaries of reason, materialism, and naturalism to reintroduce to knowledge the concept of spirit — location: 293
Much of this book responds to a simple yet critically under-acknowledged fact, which is that Berkeley has, since his death, enjoyed great popularity amongst literary writers, and is discussed, by name or by implication, in a surprising range of poems and novels. — location: 295
his lifelong friendship with Alexander Pope—by far the most successful and most widely known poet of his generation— was mutually productive, with philosopher providing images for the poet, and the poet sharpening the literary sensibility of the philosopher.¹⁴ — location: 302
including a notable resurgence of interest amongst Modernist writers, including the Irish writers Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, as well as Virginia Woolf on the English side. — location: 308
Richetti’s concern is that, by rigidly adhering to an ahistorical and contextless approach to philosophic texts, modern analytic readers risk interpreting the past solely in accordance with the logic of the present: it is as though, Richetti continues, such texts ‘are treated as if they were submissions to a modern journal of philosophy’.²⁷ Berkeley was writing before any professional distinction between philosophy and literature took place; — location: 375
To do so is to read him as he was read by the Romantics, who found in his works not just compelling images of the universe and vocabularies for the experience of that universe as it relates to the mind, but a style of argument that is predicated on expression as much as it is upon reason. — location: 391
Idealism is important to Berkeley, but only as a crucial component of his ontology of spirit, and it’s that concern with spirit—and proof of spirit’s priority over the object world—that matters most to Berkeley as a thinker. — location: 403
‘I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves—that we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see’ — location: 430
it was increasingly the view in the period that the study of nature could furnish us with all the knowledge we needed of the universe, including moral knowledge.⁴ The bible was, as the free-thinker Matthew Tindal phrased it, nothing other than a ‘republication of nature’.⁵ — location: 442
‘Speech [is] metaphorical more than we imagine’ (PC 176), an observation that suggests a keen awareness of the figurative character of even plain or quotidian language use (his emphasis is on ‘speech’ and not writing or prose). He likewise describes the way in which we are ‘imposed on’ by words such as ‘will’ and ‘agent’ — location: 505
Empiricism and rationalism are, on the hand, epistemological terms; the former concerns the senses as the source of knowledge, and the latter the mind. Berkeley’s move, in claiming that the objects of sense are already nothing than our ideas in the world, effectively brings together empiricism and idealism, without transforming him into a rationalist. That’s because Berkeley remains committed to those ideas as the source of our knowledge, even as he denies them their true externality; it is not reason that furnishes us with ideas, but our eyes, ears, and other senses. — location: 612